ABSTRACT
Al-Khoroug Lel-Nahar/Coming Forth by Day (Hala Lotfy, Egypt/United Arab Emirates, 2012) shows how revolutions on film do not always translate into fast-paced, energetic images or outspoken opinions. Recent Egyptian film production cannot avoid the revolution of 2011, but it can visually challenge the expectations of the revolution, both celebrating and lamenting the initial optimism and contemplating the impasse of post-revolutionary governance. Focusing on the relationship between a daughter and her largely absent parents, in a slow, modest and condensed fragment of a story, the emphasis is on loneliness, disappointment and suppressed feelings. More of a pressure cooker of feelings than a trajectory of development, the film refuses to engage outspokenly with the revolution. There is a sense of fear of engaging with the outside world, which is encapsulated in the elimination of space and time. A stagnating and entrapped life is portrayed in a film that refuses the classic or historical tropes of revolutionary cinema. Instead these films change film language and form to engage with the shortcomings of cinema and of life, in their inability to cope with and represent the deflated nature of a failed revolution. Its defiance of expectations stands out and heralds a new approach to revolutionary cinema in Egypt.
